travel tech insights

Let’s examine a very common scenario in today’s travel industry: Your customer is browsing a travel package or destination on your site, has done their research, is fairly confident your site is offering the best value, but is still unsure about completing the booking. Their virtual shopping cart is loaded, yet there’s still something holding them back from completing their purchase. How does a travel company entice or encourage this customer to click ‘buy’ and complete their booking? How does a travel company make the buying process simple, fast, and efficient?

What we’re talking about here is conversion. The scenario we described above plays out thousands of times a day in the travel industry for online travel agencies and companies in their quest to enhance online conversion rates, increase revenue, and build brand loyalty. But what’s an OTA to do to drive conversion in a competitive online landscape? How do they reconcile this situation? How do they turn probing clicks into purchases? How do they stimulate their conversion rates and leverage these successes into a jumping off point for sustainable growth and competitiveness?

You’re in an aisle at your local megamart looking at a product and trying to decide whether to purchase it. You read the description, examine the packaging, weigh the value proposition of buying it, whether it will actually perform the way you hope or help you accomplish the task you’re seeking complete. You’ve done the research on this product, spent a fair amount of time reading about it, seeking recommendations and opinions from others, yet you’re still unsure about putting it in your shopping cart. You wonder about the price, whether it may be less expensive at a different retailer, or, even after all this consideration, the product is a want or a need.

Think about the travel industry: is one of the most dynamic and segmented industries. As a player in this industry, there are lots of things that you need to think about: GDS commissions, hotel banks, markups, reseller networks, accuracy of the content and many more. And you don't just need to know about them now and then. You need to pay very close attention to what's happening in your market because the travel market is extremely dynamic.

Considering all of these, many of the players in the travel industry have lost their focus. They have forgotten who they are talking with, and what is their main target: The customer.

The Web can be a magical place: your company launches its website and over the course of weeks and months transactions begin to take place with people you’ve never heard of, from places you’ve never been. Soon you find yourself spending long hours exploring ways to build site traffic: SEO concepts and terms from Google analytics become a familiar part of your vocabulary. After months of steady effort momentum builds and a steady upward trend emerges. But not so for sales; revenue consistently lags behind projections. An inbound marketing firm is brought in and reports the conversion rate for website traffic is 1.5% - and calls it good news because it’s so close to the travel industry average of 1.6%. It sure doesn’t seem like good news, does it?